1. Field
The invention relates to online hierarchical networks, and more particularly to assigning compensation to nodes in specific paths within hierarchical networks.
2. Related Art
When a company or a person wants to achieve a certain task (such as selling an item, recruiting for a job position, etc.) using an online network, the strategy typically used is to post the objective on a web site (e.g. posting the sale of a car on an online forum or auction site, the sales of a house on real estate listing sites, or posting the job listing on an online job posting site, etc.) The poster hopes that someone stumbles across the posted objective, that this person tries to facilitate the achievement of the task either himself or by passing the task to a contact, and that eventually someone closes the transaction.
The entity may also use brokers to help find the person/entity who can ultimately help to close the transaction, and promise a compensation method for the broker. The broker will then use his/her own resources to find a buyer or job candidate depending on the objective for fulfilling the transaction. However, this method usually compensates only the broker, and does not generally compensate the broker's contacts who turned out not to be a suitable buyer or job candidate. The broker may ask the contact to provide his or her own contacts who may fulfill the transaction. This request is often refused or receives a lukewarm response because the contact does not get any benefit from facilitating the transaction.
Three examples of existing online models are shown below:
1. An online listing system is based on listing of the products on a web site, such as the sales of a business (e.g. ice cream store). Potential buyers or brokers can search the listings for attractive opportunities. The business owners may further engage brokers or tell their friends of the sale, and ask them to use their network to help facilitate the transaction. However, when the broker or the friend seeks out a potential buyer who is not interested, they often stop there and do not propagate the contact chain any further. It would be advantageous if the potential buyer can help to seek out other potential buyers for the friend or broker. However, the potential buyer who is not interested does not help because he or she does not receive any compensation for doing so.
2. Currently the model for online recruiting is based on job postings and resume database searches. While this is an obvious method, it is not very efficient in that it only compensates the job searchers and job posters. Sometimes, a company gives financial incentives to recruiters to actively go and look for job candidates for them. Nonetheless, the recruiters rely only on the contacts they have. If those contacts have no interest in the job, the recruiters usually ask the contacts to refer other candidates to them. However, most of the contacts deny knowing of other candidates or fail to follow up with the request, because they do not share in the compensation by giving out their contacts.
3. An online system which allows suppliers to list their excess inventories (e.g. empty seats on a flight, unsold inventories of plasma TV, etc.) anonymously on a web site, while potential buyers enter prices and types of inventories they are willing to pay into the system. If the price of the inventory of a supplier is below or matches the pricing criteria of the potential buyers, the potential buyers are then obligated to purchase the inventories from the particular supplier. This method requires potential buyers to have knowledge of the web site, and exhibit active interest in the available inventory. The suppliers may also engage brokers to sell the excess inventories by promising a fee for the brokers. The brokers may then contact their own contacts to facilitate a transaction. However, if the contacts are not interested, the message that the inventory is available does not get propagated further. Their contacts may refuse to refer other potential buyers to the brokers, or pass the message along themselves, since they would not be compensated for doing so.
Using the models listed above, the poster usually only gets as far as the efforts of the engaged contacts (1st level contact) since the poster does not compensate any further levels of contact (2nd level contacts, etc) for furthering the effort. To motivate the second level contacts and contacts of further levels to help facilitate the achievement of the task, the poster needs a mechanism to motivate contacts at all levels to allow the poster to leverage their contacts, and realize the full efforts of a network formed from the contact chain.